“It is generally accepted that a person who sets a fire intentionally is committing an abnormal act. His reasoning at this time is perverse, distorted.… The roots of such perverse and aberrant behavior are deep within the personality and have some relationship to sexual disturbance.”13 Ault and Reese likewise underscored the following point: “It is most important that this investigative technique be confined chiefly to crimes against the person where the motive is lacking and where there is sufficient data to recognize the presence of psychopathology at the crime scenes.”14 Profiles were thus created only when no apparent meaning could be derived from the crime itself; on the basis of chaotic crime scenes, they were meant to bring to light the rationality and comparability that the wild rage of the perpetrator had initially obscured. “Psychological profiling,” as Anthony Rider noted about arsonists in particular, “should be applied only to those cases in which the unknown subject demonstrates some form of mental, emotional, or behavioral disturbance in the crime. Unless there is perceptible psychopathology present in the crime, a profile cannot be rendered on an unknown subject.”15
For the FBI, the condition of possibility for the criminal profile was thus the insanity of the offender. The number of cases in which this new method was applied in the United States grew rapidly (in 1979 there were only 65, and in 1980 this number already surpassed 200), while in Germany the first criminal profile – commissioned, incidentally, by the FBI – was created in 1984.16 The method did not receive widespread public attention, however, until the beginning of the 1990s, and this was largely due to the film The Silence of the Lambs, in which an FBI agent trained in psychology manages to convict a serial killer. In the wake of this movie, the work of the “profiler” became a phenomenon of popular culture. A few veterans from the Behavioral Science Unit, such as Robert Ressler and John Douglas, published successful memoirs, and their type of activity has since become a fundamental component of numerous crime shows on television, among them Criminal Minds, Millennium, Cracker, and Profiler.
What a brief conceptual history of the profile reveals at once is the fact that, for an entire century, this format has been used to describe individuals in situations involving tests or manhunts. In light of Foucault's fundamental insight that, since the late eighteenth century, knowledge about human beings has been generated predominantly by marginal subjects – that the question of how to track down identities or measure bodies was driven above all by the psychiatric registration of the sick and by the police's access to criminals – it can be said that this trend was consolidated in the knowledge format of the profile. Its object was someone under evaluation or being hunted, and its creators were representatives of state authority, police authority, or scientific authority. In the profiles of the twentieth century, the relations of institutional power were realized with particular clarity. To this extent, the success stories of psychiatry and criminology can be told alongside the genesis of their registration and recording techniques.17
Even in the term's older semantic contexts, this constellation is already present. In its art-historical sense as a side view, the word “profile” had been used since the second half of the eighteenth century when attempts were made to systematize and classify certain categories of knowledge through representations of the human face. In the work of Johann Caspar Lavater, the silhouette in profile was transformed from a leisurely form of art into a cryptographic system whose proper interpretation could unlock the inner life of any man or woman. In his treatise On Physiognomy, which first appeared in 1772, Lavater left no doubt that portraits ought to depict the side of the face. As evidence for this thesis, he compared a physiognomically relevant profile drawing by Montesquieu with a less revealing portrait and declared that, in the latter, “the view of the painter, and thus the action of the muscles […] does not present to us the natural condition but rather something that is largely forced, stiff, or tense.” This disadvantage of the frontal perspective is alleviated by profile representations because anyone who allows himself to be drawn in this manner does so, according to Lavater, “in large part because the eye of the painter does not govern him but rather looks upon him more naturally and freely.”18 Profile images thus enable greater objectivity and are therefore better suited for physiognomic interpretation. A century later, a similar argument was made by the Parisian criminologist Alphonse Bertillon when he presented his new system for identifying repeat offenders. This system, which he referred to as “anthropometry,” involved a series of bodily measurements that were supplemented by profile photographs of delinquents. “It is the profile with precise lines,” according to Bertillon, “that best represents the particular individuality of any given face.”19 He believed that this was the case because of the highly identifiable nature of the ear, the form of which differs from person to person and cannot be obscured by any changes of expression while a photograph is being taken. Lavater's and Bertillon's observations make it clear that, as a side view, the profile provided types of knowledge about analyzed and classified subjects that are similar to the types produced later by the tabular and written format with the same name.20
The triumph of the self-made profile
The establishment of digital culture over the past quarter-century was accompanied by a massive redefinition and expansion of this format. Whereas Rossolimo's intelligence tests and the FBI's tracking methods were concerned with recording deviant behavior, the objective of today's profiles is largely to underscore the particular attractiveness, competence, or social integration of the person represented. As the debate over the media behavior of the mass murderers from 2012 demonstrated, the format now represents the normal instead of the pathological. How did this shift come about? In which contexts did the coerced personal description transform into something voluntarily created?
In the mid-1990s, when networked and interactive computers spread beyond the confines of American military authorities and hackers to become the global form of communication known as the internet, the technological conditions for creating public spheres changed in a fundamental way. The rapid growth of the “world wide web” and of commercial browsers such as Netscape made it possible for every user to publicize his or her own persona without engaging with the mass media's costly means of production. From the beginning, online “communication” meant not only the acceleration of exchanges between known people (i.e. the transition from letters or faxes to email) but also the ability to address previously unknown people via forums and platforms on the internet.
It was in this new and digital public sphere that the first traces of self-made profiles appeared. For instance, the website Match.com, which today has more than 30 million registered users, began its operations as the first online-dating platform at the beginning of 1995. The earliest version of the site contained the following advice: “Become a member by registering and placing your profile.” In an advertisement from 1996, moreover, the company boasted: “Match.com features engaging member profiles.”21 In recent years, the sociologist Eva Illouz has written extensively on the operating principles of online dating on Match.com and similar sites and has also focused on the profile as a format of self-representation. When registering, users have to answer dozens of questions about their physical appearance, interests, lifestyle, and values in order to provide other members with enough information about themselves and to furnish Match.com's psychologists with a sufficient amount of standardizable material. The hope of finding a “match” among the multitude of potential partners is synonymous with compatibility of two profiles. In her studies, Illouz is primarily interested in the ambivalence
